Opera 10 has arrived and finds itself needing to stand out in an increasingly …

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Today, Opera has announced the release of the Opera 10 Web browser for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms. Are the new features and performance increases enough to beat out other popular browsers? The answer: it depends mostly on your choice of platform.

New features

Opera has a history of introducing new features long before they become mainstream, and often failing to receive credit for doing so. Opera was the first browser to have tabs—now considered an essential part of any browsing experience on any platform—and also led the way in supporting mouse gestures for navigation. More recently, Opera invented Speed Dial—a way to display visual bookmarks in a grid when opening a new tab. This feature has since been copied by Safari 4. Some features, such as a built-in and fully integrated BitTorrent download client, have not yet been adopted by Opera’s competitors.

With Opera 10, it seems as if the company is slowly running out of new features to add. The new release mostly improves on existing capabilities rather than unveiling a dramatic new interface. For example, the browser now has system-wide spell checking (with dynamic red underlining) on all platforms, meaning Windows users no longer have to install the GNU Aspell plugin to improve their posts. The Speed Dial page is more customizable, letting users choose from a 2x2 up to a 5x5 grid and select a custom background image.

The most dramatic new feature is the addition of optional thumbnails for each tab. Opera already shows a large thumbnail when you mouse over a tab, but now in version 10, if you drag the bottom of the tab bar downwards, all open tabs will show dynamically-sized thumbnails. If you prefer, as I do, having your row of tabs on the right-hand side of the screen (this feature is especially useful on widescreen laptops), the thumbnails appear automatically. As you add more and more tabs, the thumbnails get squeezed either horizontally or vertically.

Horizontal tabs with thumbnails

Vertical tabs with thumbnails

The ever-present Search bar (it defaults to Google, but you can adjust this on the fly or by editing your preferences) can now be expanded by simply dragging its left edge. Curiously, there is no option to simply combine these bars as Google Chrome does, although if you type in a search query in the address bar you can scroll down to the last entry in order to search on that term.

Many of the improvements in the Opera 10 release involve the Opera Mail program, which seems like a very nice e-mail client for those users who want to get away from Outlook on Windows or Mail on OS X. One handy feature that is new to Opera 10 is the ability to select a webmail client’s Compose Message page as the default for new email messages.

Finally, as with all Opera releases, version 10 claims to offer significant performance increases over the 9.6 release. I did not have time to run comprehensive tests of all browsing areas such as startup time and webpage loading times (Opera claims that version 10 is up to 40 percent faster on pages such as Gmail and Facebook), but Opera 10 did feel slightly faster than its predecessor in this area. What I did have time to test was a simple Javascript benchmark, and here it was possible to compare Opera with other browsers.

Speed tests

In the brave new world of Web 2.0, JavaScript performance is one of the most critical areas for Web browser authors to optimize. AJAX-heavy websites are starting to load ridiculous amounts of JavaScript into memory on every page, so even minor tweaks to the Javascript engine can provide huge benefits to the end user.

To do these tests, I used my Macbook (first Unibody release) running a Core 2 Duo at 2GHz, with 2GB of RAM. On the Windows side I ran Windows XP SP3, while on the Mac side I ran OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). For each test I made sure the test page was the only thing running in a fresh instance of the browser, with no other applications loaded, and all cached files cleaned out just for good measure. All browsers were the most recent released versions—I did not run betas or nightlies. I ran the tests ten times each and took the average score. Despite these precautions, I’m sure some people will take issue with the results. Feel free to do your own testing on your own machines.

Opera 10 was 17 percent faster than Opera 9, and 10 percent faster than Firefox 3.5. However it was six percent slower than the current champion, Chrome 2.0.172. Note that all the browsers performed within about 20 percent of each other, with the exception of Internet Explorer 8, which was approximately twice as slow as every other browser.

The situation was quite different on Mac OS X, however. Here the clear winner was Safari, which rocketed to ludicrous speeds with the latest Snow Leopard-enabled version. Firefox came in second, and Opera 10, while still faster than its predecessor, came a distant third.

Because of this, and because of Safari’s use of various slick Core Graphics technologies and more native feel, I continue to stick with Apple’s Web browser when surfing under OS X. Under Windows, the slight speed increase of Chrome isn’t quite enough to offset the bevy of nice features in Opera, but the newcomer is definitely showing promise.

Oddities

There are a few minor issues with Opera 10 that make it just slightly less than perfect. The new visual look clashes awkwardly if you use the “Classic” Opera skin. The Speed Dial page contains an Ask.com search bar for no apparent reason, especially as Google is installed as the default search engine. While the built-in BitTorrent client is handy, it will sometimes slow download speeds drastically different than a stand-alone client. The Address bar and Search bar cannot be unified in an “Awesomebar” format. Under old versions of Opera, after long periods of use, the Flash plugin would stop working in full-screen mode. While I have not experienced this problem yet in Opera 10, I dread its reoccurrence. Finally, and this is the deal-breaker for some, Opera still has no extension ecosystem like Firefox.

Conclusion

Opera seems like it is at a crossroads. For many years it led the way in innovation and browser speed, yet it still struggled to find mainstream acceptance. Now, with companies like Apple and Google locked in a no-holds-barred race for browser performance, it seems as if Opera will have a tough road ahead. Still, version 10 is a welcome upgrade that provides a nice speed boost and some nifty features for what is already a feature-packed browser.